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TED | The new bionics that let us run, climb and dance

April 24, 2014

Hugh Herr is building the next generation of bionic limbs, robotic prosthetics inspired by nature’s own designs. Herr lost both legs in a climbing accident 30 years ago; now, as the head of the MIT Media Lab’s Biomechatronics group, he shows his incredible technology in a talk that’s both technical and deeply personal — with the help of ballroom dancer Adrianne Haslet-Davis, who lost her left leg in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, and performs again for the first time on the TED stage.

Comments (5)

Amazing what they have done here …. I just hope they can bring the cost down for many others to benefit from….. On that note, check out what this guy is doing at RoboHand.net He has helped a lot of great kids for $10 to $20 range. They have helped over 200 so far… http://www.robohand.net/

pault01 the answer is revenge.. for some other group that probably dropped a bomb on them.. maybe not a beautiful white dancer, but someone they cared about just as much. Someone who doesn’t get quite the same media air-time, perhaps.

Or maybe the person was mentally ill, or just born filled with hatred, who knows.

should leave politics out of this technology imho.. why stir up hatred, healing is a good thing for everyone.

Well I agree with you! I don’t see where politics inter into it though. This is a human psychology problem. Revenge may be a part of many primate psycholgies, but misdirected and disproportionate revenge is a human problem, not a political problem. It makes as little sense as some acting out, “Oh I feel wronged. Therefore I’m going to…., kill this puppy”. That’s aberrant primate behavior and it must be addressed without hatred, as if it where smallpox. What makes you think there is Anything political or emotional about it? You also seem to injected an inappropriate racial component when you say, “a beautiful white dancer”. I don’t give a hoot what innocent person recieved an injustice. The real Beauty of AI is that it can recognize injustice without Any deference to class, race, sex, orientation or belief. Ultimately AI may be FAR more trustworthy than human. I’d rather trust an AI politician with a fully transparent ethical operating system than a human with hidden agendas you can Never see.

Amazing and inspirational. This give us a tiny hint of what is to come in the decades ahead. It also shows that adversity is the foundation of much of our progress.

While we will never eliminate adversity, perhaps future AI will help us to stop adversity brought about by human stupidity. What kind of an aberrant mind would choose to bomb such a beautiful dancer? Perhaps in the future we can screen ALL human primates for such aberrant tendencies, and if found to test posiitive apprehend them and contain them. Perhaps these tendencies can be de-conditioned over time and they can reenter society provided they engage in regular screening. The rest, being those unencumbered by or resistant to the thinking process, stay in a facility.

Outstanding and awesome .. but generally great to be living at a time when assistive technologies, extending into bionics and prostheses, offer real chances for people to overcome and/or go beyond our individual physicalities in truly significant ways. This was not so much the case, only the dream, only 10-15 years ago …